today's howtos
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Arne Bahlo ☛ DIY Music Streaming with NixOS, Jellyfin and Manet
In this post, I describe how I’m hosting my own music streaming service with NixOS, Jellyfin and Manet on Hetzner for €6 / month.
If you know your way around servers, this is neither a novel nor a complicated setup—quite the opposite; the beauty of this configuration lies in its simplicity.
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Pi My Life Up ☛ How to Run Pi-hole on a Synology NAS
Being a DNS sinkhole makes this ad blocker super versatile. It should work with any device that lets you change the DNS server. All you need to do is point a device to your DNS server, which will block any ad provider requests.
A Synology NAS is a great way to run Pi-hole as it is a device you will typically have running all the time anyway. In addition, Pi-hole is super lightweight, meaning it shouldn’t consume too much processing power or memory.
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Lou Plummer ☛ How to Talk to Tech Support - I Beg You to Use These Techniques to Get Your Issues Solved Quickly and Efficiently While Keeping Your Cool and Getting Back to Work! #technology
I promise you that if you follow the steps below, your technology problems will get solved faster and with better results than if you don’t. And, trust me, I’m sure you’ve dealt with some incompetent or mean or unfriendly tech support folks in the past. I get it. That’s out of your control. What is in your control is how you react. Don’t act aggrieved or victimized. Be solution oriented and things will work out better.
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Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Documentation pages from dotfiles with config-renderer
Dotfiles are used to configure many parts of operating systems and tools. They usually grow and evolve over time and the commands ran in them might not be the most understandable.
They can be especially cryptic in files that you touch maybe once when you set up a new laptop or once every year. My dotfiles are collections of snippets copied from other people’s examples and suggestions over the years and I don’t always remember what they do or what options there are.
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Andy Bell ☛ How we’re approaching theming with modern CSS - Piccalilli
Theming, huh? There’s millions of ways to do it with various levels of complexity. I wanted to test some ideas for a prototype so I thought I’d blog about it too. It’s how we do things at Set Studio: test ideas to death during our thorough discovery process.
This prototype is not polished by any stretch of the imagination, but here’s what we’re looking at. It’s 3 web pages, all identical content-wise, but with varying levels of theming applied.
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University of Toronto ☛ The power of being able to query your servers for unpredictable things
Today, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry, we wanted to find out how much disk space /var/log/amanda was using on all of our servers. We have a quite capable metrics system that captures the amount of space filesystems are using (among many other things), but /var/log/amanda wasn't covered by this because it wasn't a separate filesystem; instead it was just one directory tree in either the root filesystem (on most servers) or the /var filesystem (on a few fileservers that have a separate /var). Fortunately we don't have too many servers in our fleet and we have a set of tools to run commands across all of them, so answering our question was pretty simple.